If the luscious red orb that sails through Flight of the Red Balloon like an airborne cherry looks as if it flew in from another movie, in some ways it did. The film, the latest wonderment from the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), takes as one of its inspirations Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic, The Red Balloon, about a young boy and the talismanic sphere that follows him through the gray streets of Paris like a dog, a lover, a ghost — as much a reminder of the precariousness of life as an emblem of innocence.
There is a young boy in this red balloon film too, Simon (Simon Iteanu), a moppet with sandy hair and serious eyes who lives with his mother, Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), in a tiny bourgeois-bohemian Parisian flat bursting with books and bric-a-brac. When the story opens, Simon is trying to coax the balloon into his grasp, his body straining upward as he clambers on the railing of a Metro stop at the Place de la Bastille, the site of the uprising that helped ignite the Revolution of 1789. Despite Simon’s pleading, the balloon floats away and sails past the quarter’s totemic July Column, a pillar that commemorates the Revolution of 1830 and is crowned with a golden winged male figure called the Spirit of Liberty.
The balloon will soon hover closer to the ground, as will the film, which centers on a handful of characters joined together in love and no small amount of confusion, much of it churned up by Suzanne. One of the most vibrantly alive and true characters in Binoche’s career, a resume inundated with melodramatic tears, Suzanne invades the film like a hurricane, a riot of colors, textures, patterns and words. She’s terminally distracted and buzzing with fury (at her estranged lover, at her neighbor), one of those bruised souls for whom every slight contains the threat of a larger drama. A professional puppeteer, she seems most at peace only when she’s giving grave, gravelly voice to one of her creations.
The story takes off shortly after the balloon does, when Simon is tethered to another elusive wanderer, Song (Song Fang, 宋芳), a Chinese national hired to be his sitter.
A former film student, Song turns out to be making a video about red balloons, which suggests that Lamorisse’s 1956 movie is beloved not only by Western children. (At one point you see snippets of her video — Simon puts in a guest appearance — which makes it seem as if Song had been scouting locations for the very film you’re watching.) Like the puppet show Suzanne performs, about a character who tries to boil the ocean to retrieve his beloved, the video speaks to something about the interior life of the character, giving shape to feeling.
The puppet play and the video are in a sense shadows of Hou’s film, which itself has a diaphanous, hypnotically ethereal quality. Part of this is due to Hou’s approach to narrative, which replaces the rigid linearity of the three-act model with complex, impressionistic forms; isolated gestures; fugitive moments; saturated moods; and visual harmony.
Yet while his stories may feel loose, elliptical (earlier titles include his 1998 masterpiece, Flowers of Shanghai), he is extraordinarily rigorous. In Flight of the Red Balloon he makes particularly expressive use of glass, as when Simon stares out a window and his gaze is met by his own reflection, a doubling that echoes the scene before, when the red balloon pauses next to its painted twinned image floating on a mural.
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